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Effects Of Grandfathering California Health Plans?

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By Dennis Jarvis

There have been many changes in the California individual health insurance market resulting from health reform and none has been more confusing than that of Grandfathering. Being in the insurance market for decades, I can usually give pretty good guidance to a shopper or client regarding directions of various plan options. Grandfathering unfortunately bucks this trend. Let’s try to understand what it is and at least provide a good grounding of the pros and cons to grandfathering.

The first big ramp up of Health Reform drew a line in the sand on October 23rd, 2010. This was the deadline after which certain mandated benefits would kick in for new plans. Any plan with an effective date before the deadline would be grandfathered providing the plan was not changed aside from a few exclusions such as adding family members. To be safe, it’s fair to say that you would not be able to change your coverage if you wanted to retain your grandfathered status. So what was the benefit to having grandfathered status?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ5lTO8A6-4[/youtube]

By avoiding the mandates on coverage (such as 100% preventative, etc), the rates for these older plans should be lower or more importantly, future rates should grow at a slower pace. With costs exploding, this is a huge advantage and many people chose to keep their grandfathered plans and status. This was after all, the “keep your plan if you like it” option discussed during the Health Reform debates. We personally discussed this decision with 1000’s of clients back in the heady days of late 2010 and the vast majority retained their grandfathered status. So, are there an drawbacks to keeping your grandfathered plan?

Part of the ambivalence back then had to do with historical knowledge of what happens to “closed plans”. Closed plans are plans which will not accept new enrollees which is what the grandfathered plans became. Usually, closed plans will enter a death spiral due to the fact that during the inevitable future rate increase, healthy people enrolled on the plan will shop the market and find cheaper alternatives or downgrades to offset rate increases. Enrolled people with health issues are unable to consider these changes and therefore the risk profile of the plan gets worse. The next rate increase reflects this with even higher increases which accelerates the whole process. Eventually, the plan is priced right out of the market and essentially dead. That’s what usually happens so why would we expect the grandfathered plans to be any different?

I brought this question to one of the carrier’s managers and his response was pretty convincing. That whole death spiral mentioned above only works if there’s actually a cheaper plan to move to! If all the new non-grandfathered plans are more expensive, the healthy people above will not move. We expect the new plans to be more expensive since they have more mandated benefits tied to them. So how did this actually play out since then?

According to plan. Apples to apples (similar benefits), the grandfathered plans are less expensive than newer plans since then and this trend will likely continue as new mandated benefits come online. You would think this would be a discussion past due since all new plans available are non-grandfathered but with every rate increase, current members need to decide if they should jump to a higher deductible to offset premiums. Every time the rates go up, we’re forced to consider the grandfathered decision all over again. First, run your instant California health insurance quote. Look at the available plans and their rates versus what you’re currently paying. We listed a “Key Factors to Comparing Health Plans” article to help you quickly break down the options. Every time we have checked, the rates have been higher unless you’re on one of the old and much richer plans. Of course, we’re happy to walk through these options with you since grandfathering makes the process of shopping California health insurance rates all the more complicated.

About the Author: Dennis Jarvis is a licensed

California health insurance quote

agent with extensive knowledge of the Individual California health market.

shop California health plans

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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Virginia – Joshua Brady, a former Sprint Nextel customer, has had his cellular phone account shut off, but not because he wasn’t paying the phone bill, or even because he was late on payments, but because a customer service representative who assisted him, began to call him outside of her job, and make death threats to him in September of 2006. She was never fired for her actions, Brady says.

Brady has agreed to be interviewed by Wikinews to tell his story. All information and claims have been logged with Brady’s attorney and federal authorities.

The representative from Sprint Nextel, who for safety reasons is only being identified as Jessica, was working at the company’s call center in Ontario, Canada where Brady’s call to customer service was directed. According to Brady, Jessica then began to call him outside of her job duties at the call center after their first contact.

Brady called the center around 6:00 p.m. (eastern time) on a Saturday and attempted to receive help on a billing question and to find a way to stop prank calls. Brady requested a “soc code”, a code placed into the phone, that would allow for the number that was pranking him to be blocked. Unfortunately, Jessica did not know what that was, but tried unsuccessfully to find it. According to Brady, the only thing she could find was “the ANI feature call centers have.”

Brady then described to Jessica the billing issue he was having. He was being charged “for text messages I was not making”, even though he had unlimited text messaging with his billing plan. Meanwhile, Jessica called for a supervisor to help locate the code. As this customer service request over the phone was taking quite a bit of time, the two of them then started to discuss what two people would normally discuss if just chatting; sports, the weather, movies and music and if Virginia was a nice place to go on vacation. The supervisor then came by Jessica’s station with no luck on finding a code.

Later that night, around 10:30 p.m., Brady received a call. He answered it and much to his surprise, it was Jessica. He answered the phone with the usual “hello” and the voice on the other end answered with “hello Josh.” Brady was “surprised” that she had not said “hello Mr. Brady.”

“I then asked who it was, and she said Jessica. She told me about her day, and hoped that I did not mind her calling.” Then according to Brady, she started to describe how much she hated working in a call center, and how the job “pays the bills”, and asked if she could “come visit me sometime”. Brady said that he “immediately started to record” the call. Brady also stated that Jessica was not aware she was being recorded, and that further conversations were recorded without her knowing.

The call lasted about 15 minutes, but Brady said she “spoke so fast and moved along through things” that he “didn’t have a chance to talk if I wanted to. It [the call] ended with me interrupting her and telling her I had to go to dinner with a friend.”

Brady immediately called customer care back and reported Jessica’s actions to a supervisor (Jason), and the Floor Manager (Also named Jessica) at the Coos Bay call center, which is where his call happened to be directed. The advice he received was to “play along” and continue to report her actions until they could locate someone “better equipped” to handle the situation.

Jessica then began to call “about every other day or so” which turned out to be almost 30 calls, according to Brady who reported each call she made to Sprint Nextel.

Sprint Nextel then told Jessica to cease and desist all contact with Brady, but that didn’t stop Jessica from contacting him. She somehow found out the screen-name of his AOL Instant Messenger account, and left messages threatening to kill him. Brady logged the messages and faxed them to Sprint, who about a week later sent Brady a letter, saying that his accounts have been terminated.

“The purpose of this letter is to inform our that our office has received a complaint regarding your recent questionable interactions with our customer care group. Recent interactions with our company have prompted us to formally contact you. Sprint Nextel terms and conditions state that “termination of services. consistent with this agreement…”, said the letter from Sprint Nextel.

Brady states that Jessica is still employed with Sprint Nextel, despite the fact that all instant messages left by Jessica were forwarded to Sprint Nextel.

As recently as July 10, 2007, as many as 1,000 accounts were terminated by Sprint Nextel because customers were complaining too much and asking too many questions about billing.

“While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs,” said one letter to a sprint customer as recent as June 29, 2007. The letter states that the service will be terminated just one day after the letter was written despite saying they “understand switching to a new carrier causes an inconvenience.”

Two weeks ago, Sprint addressed the media about the mass-cancellations. “These accounts have been researched very carefully,” Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton said. “We feel strongly that the decisions we made, we stand by them. These decisions weren’t made lightly.”

“If the average person is calling less than once per month and these people are calling 40 or 50 times more, that takes away from customer service,” Singleton said. “Our priority is to improve the customer experience.”

Wikinews sent e-mails to Sprint Nextel on July 20 regarding the Brady incident; to date no response has been received.

Update: On July 23, 2007, Wikinews received an email response from a Sprint representative, going to some length to explain the termination of the customers who were calling up to hundreds of times a month. No information was given on the Brady case covered in this article; “customer privacy considerations” were cited as the reason and “no comment” was Sprint’s reply.

Traits And Characteristics Of A Serial Killer Part Two

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Submitted by: Barney Garcia

Unorganized serial killers, share a slightly different profile. These types of serial killers tend to have below average intelligent levels and are considered to be socially inadequate; often living alone and someone who does not date. They are usually high school drop outs and have minimal interest in the media. They tend to keep a messy house and have poor hygiene. They tend to leave the body intact with a crime scene high in evidence.

There are seven types of motives that drive serial killers to kill. These include visions that the killer claims have come to them guiding them to kill , a desire to rid the population of a certain race or type of individual, hedonistic reasons; meaning the killer gets pleasure from the violence, lust; in which they kill for sexual gratification (whether the actual act of sex occurs or not), for thrill, for personal gain such as money or material goods, and power seekers, who like to control the death time of others in order to feel in control of their own lives.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdEe86TpnVk[/youtube]

Serial killers usually spread out their killings and are typically repeat offenders because the actually act they committed did not live up to their expectations. The killings tend to gain in severity as the killer becomes more experienced and are not stopped until they are jailed, or die themselves. Arrested serial killers who have received counseling and therapy have shown no improvements in their mental condition after treatment and these rehabilitation practices have even worsened the problem.

Scientists now believe that in the future there might be a cure for the defect in the brain on the medulla oblongata which is responsible for emotional reaction. While the technology, availability and ethical concerns are limiting this possibility right now, the theory is out there being worked on.

About the Author: Author Barney Garcia is a proud contributing author and enjoys writing about many different topics. Please visit my web sites @

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and

righteous-resources.info

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Drivers in the Russian capital, Moscow, were given an unexpected show courtesy of a 30-by-20 foot electronic highway billboard when an explicit pornographic video was played for nearly twenty minutes in place of the paid advertisement clips that are usually shown. The incident happened near the entrance into Serpukovskiy tunnel on Sadovoe Ring Road, about 2 kilometers south of the Kremlin.

“Within three minutes we found it out, and within fifteen minutes the screen was shut off,” the deputy head of the Moscow city advertising committee, Alexander Menchuk, said in a statement to Interfax. A passerby told the Associated Press that she was “so shocked that I couldn’t even shoot video or take a picture of it.”

The display screen’s owner, the Three Stars Advertising Agency of Panno.ru, said that computer hackers attempting to execute a practical joke were likely to blame. Viktor Laptev, commercial director for the firm said, “They were either acting out of hooliganism or were from a rival company.”

Although a city official has been quoted as telling local media that Moscow would increase security of data transmission in light of what happened, local police say they have yet to receive a single complaint about the incident, and thereby have not opened an investigation. Nudity on television is officially banned in Russia.

Not Another Stop Smoking Sermon This}

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Not Another Stop Smoking Sermon This

franols

Stop Smoking:

With a smoke in my hand, I felt like a manBut the smoke in my hand made me a dead man..-Anonymous.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcy-AQ470pE[/youtube]

Before you click away from this page and declare that I am just another aunt agony who is going to talk you to stop smokingRECONSIDERI am not here to save you or the world (lets leave that to atlas). Smoking is as old as mankind itself, so go the talks on stop smoking. Then with the naissance of safety matches and mass production of tobacco, smoking got more popular and accessible to the novices and addicted equally.

Majority of them try out smoking for the sake of it, or out of mere peer pressure or out of curiosity and this sows the dirty seed in their lifein spite of being aware of its addictive and sometimes parasitic nature. They only fight their conscious and reason out a way not to stop smoking that one time. Each time one tries to pledge not to slip it in between the fingers-like every other, the eight inches pipe looks more innocent and inviting and for once, they give in.

The sheer thrill of holding it with more panache with every new one makes one feel cool (we still need a vivid definition for it). It is like you have tamed the fire to be a mere toying in your hand; the thrill of the smoke oozing out of the system is as special as your first kiss (especially if you manage to do it without coughing in your first drag). It is a victorious feeling that is unparalleled to any feat. And in the process you do not really care for the air around or the lungs or whatever that really burns up!

Our pious pledge to stop smoking crumbles into the trash and we formulate a new philosophy to suit our changing needs. It is our best buddy in time of need – no back biting, better than the girlfriends (as it comes sans rules and tantrums), a stress buster and a reliable social companion. But what does not hit the head is that one should not always consider me, myself and I aloneother people need to be given a thought toowhats more harmful is the secondary smoke that passes the people around pushing venomous gas into their nostrils without a choice well did I mention too often that you must stop smoking?

For more information visit:

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Friday, May 16, 2008

Controversy has arisen over the reported presence of blue asbestos on the MV Freewinds, a cruise ship owned by the Church of Scientology. According to the Saint Martin newspaper The Daily Herald and the shipping news journal Lloyd’s List, the Freewinds was sealed in April and local public health officials on the Caribbean island of Curaçao where the ship is docked began an investigation into the presence of asbestos dust on the ship. Former Scientologist Lawrence Woodcraft supervised work on the ship in 1987, and attested to the presence of blue asbestos on the Freewinds in an affidavit posted to the Internet in 2001. Woodcraft, a licensed architect by profession, gave a statement to Wikinews and commented on the recent events.

According to The Daily Herald, the Freewinds was in the process of being renovated by the Curaçao Drydock Company. The article states that samples taken from paneling in the ship were sent to the Netherlands, where an analysis revealed that they “contained significant levels of blue asbestos”. An employee of the Curaçao Drydock Company told Radar Online in an April 30 article that the Freewinds has been docked and sealed, and confirmed that an article about asbestos ran in the local paper.

Lloyd’s List reported that work on the interior of the Freewinds was suspended on April 27 after health inspectors found traces of blue asbestos on the ship. According to Lloyd’s List, Frank Esser, Curaçao Drydock Company’s interim director, joined Curaçao’s head of the department of labor affairs Christiene van der Biezen along with the head of the local health department Tico Ras and two inspectors in an April 25 inspection of the ship. “We are sending someone so that they can tell us what happened, where it came from, since when it has been there,” said Panama Maritime Authority’s director of merchant marine Alfonso Castillero in a statement to Lloyd’s List.

The Church of Scientology purchased the ship, then known as the Bohème, in 1987, through an organization called Flag Ship Trust. After being renovated and refitted, it was put into service in June 1988. The ship is used by the Church of Scientology for advanced Scientology training in “Operating Thetan” levels, as well as for spiritual retreats for its members. Curaçao has been the ship’s homeport since it was purchased by the Church of Scientology.

According to his 2001 statement, Lawrence Woodcraft had been an architect in London, England since 1975, and joined Scientology’s elite “Sea Organization” (Sea Org) in 1986. He wrote that he was asked by the Sea Org to work on the Freewinds in 1987, and during his work on the ship “noticed a powdery blue fibrous substance approximately 1 ½” thick between the paint and the steel wall,” which he believed to be asbestos. He also discovered what he thought was blue asbestos in other parts of the ship, and reported his findings to Church of Scientology executives. Woodcraft discussed his experiences in a 2001 interview published online by the Lisa McPherson Trust, a now-defunct organization which was critical of the Church of Scientology.

	The Freewinds regularly inspects the air quality on board and always meets or exceeds US standards.

Church of Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw responded to Radar Online about the asbestos reports, in an email published in an article in Radar on May 1. “The Freewinds regularly inspects the air quality on board and always meets or exceeds US standards,” said Pouw. She stated that two inspections performed in April “confirmed that the air quality is safe,” and asserted that the inspections revealed the Freewinds satisfies standards set by the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Pouw told Radar that “The Freewinds will be completing its refit on schedule.” The Church of Scientology-affiliated organization Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) had been planning a cruise aboard the Freewinds scheduled for May 8, but according to Radar an individual who called the booking number for the cruise received a message that the cruise had been delayed due to ongoing work on the ship. Citing an article in the Netherlands Antilles newspaper Amigoe, Radar reported on May 6 that a team from the United States and supervised by an independent bureau from the Netherlands traveled to Curaçao in order to remove asbestos from the Freewinds.

	…if the Church of Scientology claims to have removed the blue asbestos, I just don’t see how, it’s everywhere. You would first have to remove all the pipes, plumbing, a/c ducts, electrical wiring etc. etc. just a maze of stuff.

“I stand by everything I wrote in my 2001 affidavit,” said Lawrence Woodcraft in an exclusive statement given to Wikinews. Woodcraft went on to state: “I would also comment that if the Church of Scientology claims to have removed the blue asbestos, I just don’t see how, it’s everywhere. You would first have to remove all the pipes, plumbing, a/c ducts, electrical wiring etc. etc. just a maze of stuff. Also panelling as well, basically strip the ship back to a steel hull. Also blue asbestos is sprayed onto the outer walls and then covered in paint. It’s in every nook and cranny.”

Many Scientologist celebrities have spent time aboard the Freewinds, including Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Chick Corea, Lisa Marie Presley, Catherine Bell, Kate Ceberano, and Juliette Lewis. Now magazine reported that Tom Cruise has been urged to seek medical attention regarding potential asbestos exposure, however a representative for Cruise stated he has “absolutely no knowledge” of the recent asbestos controversy. Cruise, Holmes, Travolta and Preston have celebrated birthdays and other events on the Freewinds.

	There is not now and never has been a situation of asbestos exposure on the Freewinds.

In a May 15 statement to the United Kingdom daily newspaper Metro, a representative for the Church of Scientology said that “There is not now and never has been a situation of asbestos exposure on the Freewinds.” The Asbestos and Mesothelioma Center notes that agencies have recommended anyone who has spent time on the Freewinds consult with their physician to determine if possible asbestos exposure may have affected their health.

Raw blue asbestos is the most hazardous form of asbestos, and has been banned in the United Kingdom since 1970. Blue asbestos fibers are very narrow and thus easily inhaled, and are a major cause of mesothelioma. Mesothelioma is a form of cancer which can develop in the lining of the lungs and chest cavity, the lining of the abdominal cavity, or the pericardium sac surrounding the heart. The cancer is incurable, and can manifest over 40 years after the initial exposure to asbestos.

“This is the most dangerous type of asbestos because the fibres are smaller than the white asbestos and can penetrate the lung more easily,” said toxicologist Dr. Chris Coggins in a statement published in OK! Magazine. Dr. Coggins went on to note that “Once diagnosed with mesothelioma, the victim has six months to a year to live. It gradually reduces lung function until the victim is no longer able to breathe and dies.”

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Also try the 2008 World News Quiz of the year.

What would you tell your grandchildren about 2008 if they asked you about it in, let’s say, 20 years’ time? If the answer to a quiz question was 2008, what would the question be? The year that markets collapsed, or perhaps the year that Obama became US president? Or the year Heath Ledger died?

Let’s take a look at some of the important stories of 2008. Links to the original Wikinews articles are in all the titles.